Plants can sense parasitic roundworms in the soil by picking up on their chemical signals, a team of researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI), on the Cornell University campus, has found.

"Do humans have pheromones?" asks a review published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B today. Professor Tristram Wyatt from the University of Oxford says that if we want to find out we need to start from scratch.

The circumstances in which a protein closely associated with Parkinson's Disease begins to malfunction and aggregate in the brain have been pinpointed in a quantitative manner for the first time in a new study.

Most insects are covered with a thin layer of hydrocarbon molecules as a waterproofing barrier. Embedded in this layer are compounds that the insects use as chemical signals for a wide variety of functions such as communicating ...

New research has found that one of the world's most prolific bacteria manages to afflict humans, animals and even plants by way of a mechanism not before seen in any infectious microorganism—a sense of touch. This unique ...

(Phys.org) —A team of scientists led by Yale University systems biologist and biomedical engineer Andre Levchenko has developed a novel method for mapping the biochemical variability, or "noise," in how human cells respond ...

Just as human relationships are a two-way street, fusion between cells requires two active partners: one to send protrusions into its neighbor, and one to hold its ground and help complete the process. Researchers have now ...

(Phys.org)—While some advanced humanoid robots already look eerily lifelike, robots in the future may actually become partly alive. Currently, researchers are working on integrating living cells and other biological components ...